How to Draw Anime Hand(s) Right Every Time
Let’s learn how to draw anime hand(s)!
Hands are an area that many artists struggle to draw, earning their long-standing reputation of being notoriously difficult.
Don’t feel bad if you have trouble with hands.
Even experienced artists mess up hands sometimes – myself included. This is despite my drawing literally thousands of hands.
When you think about it, it’s no surprise people have a hard time with hands. They can articulate in an innumerable number of positions, and every one of these positions can be seen from a different angle.
That’s tough stuff.
But, like anything else in drawing, the best strategy is to understand the fundamental pieces. If you just memorize the end result of a few positions you don’t really master anything.
Learn the pieces, and you can draw any hand in any position. That’s what I want to you to learn so you never struggle with hands ever again.
First, I’m going to walk you through the basic sections and proportions of a hand so you know how it all fits together.
Second, I’ll show you the process for drawing your own hands.
Finally, I’ll break down some common mistakes beginners make when drawing hands so you can avoid them.
Though if you want avoid the pain of drawing hands all together, I have a bunch of pre-made poses you can just use.
Let’s go!
How to Draw Anime Hand(s) Easy as Cake
Wanna make drawing manga hands easy? Start by understanding what makes up a hand.
Did you know a human hand has 27 bones in it? That’s 54 bones between your two hands. And the human body has a total 206 bones in it.
That’s means your hands are a quarter of your ENTIRE skeleton’s pieces!
No wonder hands are so hard to draw.
On the back of the hand you have the knuckles, of course. These line up with the bones underneath your skin (called phalanges).
The back of the hand’s surface doesn’t change too much as hands articulate. If you look at your own hand, you’ll see there’s little change in the back of your hand as you make fists and move fingers around.
The only appendage that really changes from the back view is how much of the thumb is visible.
On the front of the hand, there are 3 areas of the palm that we need to think about as we draw hands.
Those pieces are the base of the thumb (orange), base of the fingers (blue), and the side of the hand (green).
Also, be mindful of the wrist to hand connection. This is often an overlooked part of the overall hand structure (an important thing to keep in mind for drawing accurate hands).
Regarding proportions, a human half is roughly half palm and half fingers. You can play with this ratio to create different hands.
Shorter fingers will be seen as more childlike with longer fingers to palm length will make the hand look more adult or elegant.
The first digit (extending from the palm) of the fingers is just under half of the total finger length, the remaining digits are a quarter each.
The length of the pinky is usually the length of the first 2 digits of the ring finger.
If you’re overwhelmed by all the parts of the hands, you can get some help here.
How to Draw Anime Hand(s) Step by Step
In the last section, I just showed you how all the pieces of the hand fit together.
Now let’s go over how to make any position of a hand step by step.
As a guideline, especially while learning, the process is start simple then add complexity.
I always start with a very simple guideline of a hand, follow by a sketch of the general shapes before doing final lines.
- Start with a rough measurement sketch to make sure everything has the right proportions and placement
- Block in the general shapes of the fingers, thumb, and palm.
- Clean it up, and draw your final lines
When creating hands three helpful techniques to use are lines, mittens, and webs.
These techniques are used to place your fingers, since those are the actual tricky part. You don’t have to use just one either. Feel free to mix and match them.
For lines you just draw out the general direction of the finger with its joints as you want them to actuate. Lines are useful to make sure your fingers will end up in the right spot at the right length.
Mittens are useful for setting up groups of curled fingers.
Webs are useful for making sure all the fingers are the right length compared to each other, since spread out fingers tend to create an arc.
Spread your own fingers right now and see how you can draw a gentle curved line between your the ends of all your fingers.
Perspective Tip:
When drawing in perspective, like our pointing example. That index finger might confuse you.
Whatever finger it may be, start by drawing the ending digit first and work backwards. This helps align the finger in the correct spot.
If you’re not sure how to do a specific position, you can always ask me to make a specific guide.
How to Draw Anime Hand(s) for Beginners
Here are some things to keep in mind to show off well you know your anatomy.
Like anything in art, you don’t have to follow these rules. But this are an easy way to improve how skillful your art looks.
You can also just use poses for reference or a general guide.
CURLING FINGERS
When making fists or curling fingers, be mindful that the fingers curl into the meat of the palm and don’t float.
It can be helpful to think of the digits of your fingers as little circles that fit against each other if you struggle with this.
This can be a useful visual or mental trick to make sure you aren’t combining or skipping digits when drawing a curled finger.
WRIST FOLDS
When the palm bends backwards, remember that the skin will fold. You can ignore this detail if you want, but
WRIST BUMP
That bump is the end of the ulna bone in your forearm.
Adding a slight bump to where the arm connects to the hand is a nice flourish to show off how good you are at anatomy.
FINGER SHAPE
The digits of the fingers aren’t perfect cylinders. They have a slight curve to them on both sides. This subtle curve is especially important to anime.
Both the tops of bottoms of the fingers tend to have a slight curve downwards.
How to Draw Anime Girl Hand(s) and/or Anime Style Hands
The key to anime is often simplicity.
Remember that anime is essentially a cartoon. You don’t need to draw every single detail. Anime is more about the outline of the body part plus some minor suggestions of detail.
So, despite having all this new information about hands, don’t get carried away with details.
Anime hands are often very simple. There are some exceptions to this, depending on the character or era of anime.
But again, in most cases, focus on an outline with the odd line for detail.
In many cases, anime fingers are drawn as just 2 digits (with the ending 3rd digit not visible). When doing this you only draw the ending 3rd digit when it’s important for communicating to a viewer what the finger is doing.
This includes movements like making a fist, gripping an object, emphasizing pointing, hand close ups, etc.
You can include a slight upturn towards the end of the finger to suggest the end (third) digit.
Heck! Sometimes, if a finger is fully extended, it might not even look like 2 digits, but rather 1 smooth, continuous finger.
You can see it in some of my examples in this guide. If you’re not sure you can talk to me directly.
But if this doesn’t make sense, go study a few different anime shows and you’ll see what I mean.
Anime is all about simplification and omitting detail.
But never neglect learning drawing from reality. The deeper your understanding of what you’re drawing, the better you can skew reality.
The key to good abstraction and simplification, like chibi for instance, is a thorough understanding of what you’re abstracting.
That is to say, the better you understand something, the more you can play with it.
If I hadn’t made it clear yet, there is a lot of simplification in anime.
It’s not uncommon during animation, say during action sequences, for the hand to only be a pinkish blob with little to no finger delineation.
Other times, you’ll see the proportions skewed for a stylistic or comedic effect.
How to Draw Anime Hand(s) with a Pencil
Here’s a peace sign done by pencil.
It’s absolutely necessary for any half decent anime artist to know how to draw a peace sign. Don’t you think?
Anyway, let’s break it down.
The process for drawing by pencil is exactly the same as digital.
Just make sure you start with light loose lines to begin with, adding progressively more tightness and weight to your lines as you commit to the shapes.
Erase gently in between steps to keep everything clean.
Conclusion
With that, I hope I’ve managed to show you that drawing anime hands isn’t all that scary.
They just take time like anything else.
Stop hiding hands in pockets or behind backs when you draw characters and embrace drawing hands.
Also, the newer you are, the more I suggest you go really slow in the early stage of the sketch.
Really try to visualize all the structures of the hand and where everything goes.
Be meticulous. Don’t be afraid to go look at your hand in the mirror, take a picture, and use it as a reference.
The more you do this, the more it becomes second nature.
And the more internalized it is, the sooner you can just draw a hand without thinking. Which is the goal, right?
Anime Hand Poses
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